A toddle down New Age Lane:
I suppose anybody who can talk can recite the particulars of what is Liberal and what Conservative. I doubt that many have command over what the two mental fixations have in common. I sure don’t. So far as I can tell there is no resistance to having foreign governments spy on us in a way that would be illegal for us to spy on ourselves and for buying the results from said governments. Also the Pacific Rim Treaty, if I even have the name right, seems to me to violate our sovereignty and abrogate any loincloth of environmental protection, worker safety and rights and minimum wage, pollution, quality control, protection of native sacred sites and so forth. But I have seen far less debate than over less important things.
Still in all, mainstream politics is as dull as it is mindlessly savage. So for recreation I do follow New Age thinking sometimes. If you want to know more about my personal vices just ask; I have no secrets.
A nice thing about New Age is that you hardly get two writers who are in close agreement. If you don’t take the position “all errors are the same” then there is variety. Well recently I got a communication from a young woman I like so of course even if I weren’t predisposed by curiosity I’d have looked it over just to be polite. The bottom line is that there are 13 families who control 95% of the wealth of the world. They are Martians and they aren’t nice. They have a different number of chromosomes.
Indulge me while I dismiss the Martian concept. And I do remember professionals discussing chromosome number many many years ago. In those days the Japanese, whom we all expected to have the best technique, kept counting 48 chromosomes while we found 46. At a biochemistry department meeting somebody proposed that the Japanese really had a different number. It was proposed seriously, although everybody laughed. So let me dismiss that along with the Martians.
So what could we possibly know about the 13 families? Well for one thing, wherever outbreeding is taking us, the ultra-rich will get there first. Even if they confine their choices to family the families are probably large, in the hundreds or thousands. And of course that’s lethal given enough time, which they probably have had.
So what do you do if everybody in the family is over 50 and you want to keep the money in family? Well you have the oldest and sickest marry the youngest and strongest. That won’t work forever, but it will work for a few years while they thrash around and look for a long term fix, which of course is not there. They will never guess the truth, which any reader of this site knows or any reader of chapter 19 in Handbook for Evolution and Society, the chapter written by the incredibly brilliant Robin Fox, “Marry In or Die Out.”
Transferring wealth has two advantages over transferring by will. For one thing, when a married person dies there is no tax on the property the couple had. That’s a lot of money, but not the big issue. The big issue is that a will is registered and the wealth reported. That might be far more valuable.
Now let’s just say that instead of the whole world it’s just the US and instead of 13 families it’s 13 million. Now it’s rather more believable but the logic is unchanged. We’ve just had a Supreme Court ruling that says any unmarried adult can marry any consenting unmarried adult. This is a tremendous advantage to the super rich. I don’t know about you, but ignoring the virtues of the case, and I come down on the side of let ‘em do it, the speed with which this remarkable social change occurred was terrific. I suspect the 13, or more plausibly the 13 million, were pushing it.
I doubt we see debate resuming, and I don’t even know if we will know what the hidden effect will be. But let’s hear it for lateral thinking. If you have an idea that is basically unknown, assuming it is not clearly anti-social, I would be pleased to know it. And if you know of any other forum for such things, I’d like to know that as well.
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